Dandelion Clocks
by thesilversun
Summary: It is said that to have loved and lost is preferable to having never loved at all. Nightingale was never sure whether it was true or not, both carried with them their own particular kind of loss.


Title:Dandelion Clocks

Fandom: Rivers of London.

Rating: G

Characters/Pairing: Thomas Nightingale, past Thomas Nightingale/David Mellenby.

Word Count: 2050

A/N: Thank you to Philomytha for betaing this for me. Any errors that remain are my own.

Summary: It is said that to have loved and lost is preferable to having never loved at all. Nightingale was never sure whether it was true or not, both carried with them their own particular kind of loss.

So many relationships had been doomed by the war. Death was easy to understand, it was the ultimate form of separation. Yet there were so many other ways that people could be be parted. After surviving the war, something that Nightingale hadn't been sure would happen, he had never once considered that upon his return to England he would not be able to continue with his life as it had been. It had been quiet life, lived more than half in secret, as between the magic and his relationship with David Mellenby it couldn't have been anything else. But it had been good, it had been all he wanted.

That David hadn't returned to Oxford after the war had surprised him. Perhaps it shouldn't have. After all what was wrong with David, who'd be the most brilliant and innovative of the wizards who survived the war. Wanting more from life than teaching Latin to the sons of those in government or on the boards of companies was hardly surprising.

During the war he hadn't minded David choosing a life without him in it. They'd all had to play their parts, it had been expected of them, and part of him had been relieved when David had secured a research post where he would be safe from most of the dangers of war. He'd been certain, naively so he later thought, that as long as they survived nothing else would change between them. He'd made plans that once the war was over he would leave his job in London and go back to Oxford, were he'd spent many happy years as a boy. He had enough skills that finding a suitable position, perhaps in the police, shouldn't be too difficult. He could rent somewhere near to the college where David would surely return to take up his position as a lecturer. They'd fall back into their old pattern of going to pubs, playhouses and cinemas, or watching the rowing teams at practice on the Thames. Just two men who'd put work and duty to their country before finding a wife, drifting through middle age together. Both respectable and in their mid forties, the world wouldn't give them a second glance as long as they didn't give it reason to. It wasn't perfect, yet it was as much as society would allow them and more than most in their position ever got.

Instead, David had remained in Surrey at the research facility where he'd been since the start of the war, working on something he never really explained. Attempts at arranging a time to meet and to talk failed, usually with David cancelling at the last moment, to the point where Nightingale was sincerely thinking about forgoing propriety and just turning up at David's house on the pretext of returning a book he'd lent him before the war. In the end that proved unnecessary, although the meeting, when it finally came years after the war was over, was all too brief.

Standing at a bus stop in the small village on the border between Surrey and Hampshire that David now called home, Nightingale couldn't help but notice that David seemed distant, almost uninterested in him. And as he'd feared his hopes of renewing the relationship faded in the bright morning sunlight.

"I can't live that life any more. I have my position to think of," David said as he looked around at the village green, where on the far side of it a man mowed the cricket pitch and few ducks swam on the lily-filled pond. "You must have heard what they did to Turing. Do you want that for me? or for yourself?"

"It would not have to be like that," Nightingale said, voice low despite the fact that there was nobody there to hear them. "We would be careful. We were before. I am not asking you move to London with me. Just that I can still see you, that we can meet maybe once a month." He took a step closer to him. "Or more often if we could. I've missed you more than I can say."

"I can't." David smiled sadly and then shook his hand. "I'm sorry. I truly am."

It was the last time they were to spoke in person, which hurt in a way Nightingale was sure would never entirely fade. Their friendship had endured although in a pale imitation of what it had once been in years before the war. There had been professional contact, formal letters detailing magic occurrences and whether it was possible to define the decay rate of it, and whether it was possible to predict when it would have declined to the point where there was so little left that producing the simplest formae would be impossible. When David retired at sixty five those letters stopped, and the two years without contact, or rather with David's lack of response to Nightingale's letters had been hard. Finally late in 1967, with the decriminalisation of homosexuality, he'd written David another letter. They were old men now, the world would assume they were too old for matters of love anyway. That was the way of the world. The police force were pushing to retire him, although as they had no replacement they couldn't, and with the apparent terminal decline of magic he hadn't felt able to take an apprentice. There was barely enough to get even a faint werelight now. Surely after all they had given between them they could spend their autumn years together?

David's response, that he'd married, six years earlier, but had been too much of a coward to tell him, had been stunning. The vain hope for a future that he'd tried not to imagine died before it could ever be realised and there was nothing to take its place. If he retired what would he do? What would Molly do? Would she leave the Folly and come with him? In the end there had been no choice to make, all he had was his job and the fading magic, so at the Folly he remained.

So nine more years went by with their only contact being polite, but impersonal, Christmas cards first written by David and then written by Evelyn, David's wife. Until finally in the summer of 1976, with bright morning sunlight streaming through the windows of the Folly, a letter had come. The last letter. David was gone.

Seventy seven wasn't exactly ancient, but they had been long and lonely years, and for a moment standing in the breakfast room at the Folly, the letter held tightly in his hand, they seemed to stretch out for an eternity in front of him. He had never been an emotional man, even before the war and that final, nightmare battle at Ettersberg had wrought their damage, but tears that he'd thought he'd never be able to shed came nevertheless.

At their ages the deaths outnumbered any other events and he went to more funerals than weddings. Not that he went to many of either really as after the loses of the war he'd found it hard to reconnect with his life as it had been. The nature of his job at the Folly hadn't aided him in either finding or retaining friends. Yet there had been something comforting in being able to retreat into work and the centuries-old traditions of the now nearly vanished life that Folly still maintained.

Now the Folly seemed stifling, and after carefully putting the letter and its sad news away in his writing desk, Nightingale decided that he needed to get outside just for a short time, enjoy the sun while it lasted. That was all you could do with life, he told himself. Take it a day at a time and enjoy what you had while it lasted because those days would never come again. For himself it seemed especially true. Magic was fading, the world no longer had need of men like himself. David had realised it years before and had moved on. Perhaps it was for the best, he told himself, trying to believe that it was the truth. All things grew old and died, why should magic be the exception?

Yet if magic truly was dying how did the Rivers remain? Why did they seem to grow in number now that Mama Thames was there? How could they thrive when magic seemed barely strong enough to sustain the most basic of formae? Struck with sudden curiosity Nightingale made a werelight. It had been the first forma that David, who'd been in the year above him at school, had shown him, the first proper magic that he'd seen. He frowned at it. It seemed a little brighter. Not the rich, amazing golden glow that it had been back in 1911 when David had so proudly shown it to him. Surely it was brighter than the pale thing, sickly like a dying moon that it had been when he'd last used one to light his way out of an old building just a few weeks before. It was just his memory playing tricks on him, he told himself as he extinguished it; that or the dimly lit hallway with its heavy Victorian décor was tricking his eyes into thinking it was brighter than it really was.

Taking his hat and cane from the stand in the hall, he called back into the Folly, that he would be back before lunch, knowing that Molly would hear him wherever she was . The relative cool of the morning was starting to give way to another blisteringly hot August day, but for now it was pleasant enough, he decided as he slowly descended the few steps from the door to the pavement, cane in one hand, the other gripping tight to the railing.

They'd be a nightmare come winter, he thought, unable with the all too resent news of David's passing to still his own morbid musings of how many more of those winters he'd actually see. Waking stiff, tired and unrefreshed from sleep had become normal. The idea of not waking had begun to be comforting more than fearful. He didn't believe in Heaven and there was enough horror and suffering on Earth for there to be no need for a Hell either. He could see the comfort of the idea though, of meeting your loved ones again, of having eternity in paradise with them. The idea that he might see David again in the hereafter was seductive, yet it felt like a lie, something that was not meant for either of them.

One way or another he would find out, Nightingale thought as he crossed the road to the park at the heart of Russell Square. Making his way over the dry, yellowing grass and under the spreading shade of towering plane trees he paused a moment to watch a child blowing the seeds from a dandelion. The young boy counting one o'clock, two o'clock and continuing until they were all gone and then chasing them on the breeze through the park. Nightingale smiled, remembering another hot summer more than sixty years past, and David getting him to blow the seeds and them freezing them in mid air with a new combination of formae he'd been working on.

It had been a different world then, they'd been children with no knowledge of the war that was to happen in a few short years and which would sow the seeds for a far greater conflict which they would both be a part of and which would finally part them. In the grand scheme of things life was as fleeting as those seeds caught on the hot summer breeze.

Moving out of the shade to sit on a bench in sunshine, the warmth made his old bones feel a little less stiff and weary. Nightingale watched the city around him. London had changed so much in the years he'd come to call it home, and those changes seemed to be happening faster than ever, technology doing things that as boy would have been more incredible to him than magic. Yet for all the world was a different place there were still moments like this to enjoy the simple things in life, and for that he was glad.


End file.
